The SPIS in Ontario Real Estate — Should Your Seller Sign One?

Last updated 11 September 2026. Written by Jatin Dua, Broker of Record at RE/MAX Quantum Realty, 799 The Queensway, Etobicoke · For Ontario registrants · 10 min read

Two competent practitioners, opposite advice

Ask a real estate lawyer in Ontario whether a seller should complete an SPIS and you may get a flat no — several firms in this province say so publicly and have for years. Ask an experienced listing agent and you may get an equally flat yes. Both have watched files go wrong. They watched different files.

I am not going to pretend this is settled, because it is not. What I can do is set out the argument on both sides, show you what the clauses mechanically do, and then spend real time on the part nobody writes about: what the SPIS does to the listing agent’s own position. Whichever way the seller decides, you are in the chain of the document.

What SPIS-1 and SPIS-2 actually do

SPIS-1 (Condition – Buyer’s Acceptance of SPIS) does two separate things in one clause, and agents routinely only notice the first. It makes the agreement conditional on the buyer receiving a completed statement and finding the information on it satisfactory in the buyer’s sole and absolute discretion, running to a stated time on a stated day and requiring positive written notice of fulfilment — silence ends the agreement and returns the deposit. Then, in a second part, it obliges the seller to deliver the completed statement on acceptance, with complete and accurate answers given to the best of the seller’s knowledge and belief.

SPIS-2 (SPIS – Buyer’s Acknowledgement) is a different animal. It is an acknowledgement, signed by the buyer, that they received a completed statement from the seller and had an opportunity to read it before submitting the offer. It is used where the statement was already on the table. It creates no condition and gives the buyer no exit.

Be honest about who SPIS-2 helps. It is a record that the buyer saw the document, which is useful to the seller and, quietly, to the listing agent. That is a fair record of something that happened — but an agent who presents it to a buyer as a protection has mischaracterised it.

Pull both clauses from your own OREA member copy before you use them. I am describing what they do and where they pinch; the wording is theirs.

The case against the SPIS

The lawyers’ objection is not squeamishness. It is a specific argument and it is a good one.

Ontario starts from caveat emptor on patent defects. A seller who says nothing is generally in a stronger position than a seller who says something inaccurate. Completing an SPIS converts silence into a set of written statements made by a layperson, under time pressure, about a building they may not understand. Each of those statements can later be measured against what a buyer discovers, and a misstatement — even an honest one — becomes the spine of a misrepresentation claim that would not otherwise exist.

Add the practical problems. Sellers answer from memory: “has there ever been water in the basement” gets a no from someone who half-remembers a damp patch in 2011. Estate trustees, lenders under power of sale and corporate sellers often have no personal knowledge and should not be answering at all. And a seller who checks “unknown” thirty times has produced a document that tells a buyer nothing while still signing a page.

On that analysis the seller gives up a protection they already had and receives nothing measurable in return. It is not a weak argument.

The case for it

The other side is not naive either. It starts from the fact that caveat emptor has boundaries, and the boundaries are where the litigation happens anyway.

RECO’s guidance is that patent defects need not be disclosed, that actively concealing one removes that protection, and that latent defects rendering a property unfit for habitation or dangerous must be disclosed — with the seller’s agent who knows of such a fact required to disclose it to every interested buyer, obtain an acknowledgement from each, and give each a copy. Those duties come from case law rather than the TRESA regulations, and they exist whether or not anyone fills in a form.

So the seller who imagines that declining an SPIS keeps them out of the disclosure conversation is mistaken. What the statement does is create a dated, documented record of what the seller said they knew when they said it. In a later dispute about concealment that is evidence for the seller, not only against them — and producing it forces a real conversation with the listing agent that often surfaces the latent defect which had to be disclosed anyway.

There is a market argument too: buyers increasingly expect one, and refusal reads as a signal whether or not it is meant as one.

What a knowledge qualifier really does

Everything on an SPIS is given to the best of the seller’s knowledge and belief. Buyers’ agents in particular need to understand what that qualifier does, because it is the hinge of most of the disputes.

Coppendale v. Mills, 2025 ONSC 5192 is the case to know, and as reported the facts are worth sitting with. The buyers had waived their home inspection condition. Before closing they discovered moisture in the basement, took the position that a warranty given to the best of the seller’s knowledge had been breached, and refused to close. The court read the knowledge-qualified warranty as speaking to the seller’s knowledge at the time of signing rather than at closing. The buyers forfeited a $20,000 deposit and were ordered to pay $206,703.56 in damages.

Two lessons travel to an SPIS. A knowledge qualifier is a real limit, not a guarantee about the building. And refusing to close because you believe a knowledge-qualified statement was inaccurate is an expensive bet — a decision for the buyer’s lawyer, not for an agent on a phone call three days before completion.

Whether a seller can be liable after closing on an SPIS answer depends on the wording, on survival and merger, and on the facts. Those are legal questions decided one file at a time. What you can say accurately is that these documents do end up in litigation.

The timing defect in SPIS-1 that nobody fixes

Read the mechanics of SPIS-1 with a calendar in front of you. The buyer’s condition period starts on acceptance. So does the seller’s obligation to deliver. Nothing guarantees the buyer any particular amount of time with the document once it arrives.

So a five-day condition where the seller delivers on day four leaves the buyer one day to read it, ask questions and decide. Deliver on day six and the buyer is past their deadline holding nothing. Agents argue that a failure to deliver must extend the condition. Maybe. That is an argument, and arguments are what you are supposed to be preventing.

The fix is structural and belongs with the clients’ lawyers: the delivery obligation needs its own short deadline, and the buyer’s window should run from actual delivery. Where the statement already exists, get it to the buyer before the offer and use SPIS-2 to record that it happened.

The listing agent’s own exposure

You are not a party to the SPIS. You are, however, usually the person who put the form in front of the seller, explained what it was, watched them complete it, delivered it to buyers, and then wrote marketing copy informed by it. Every one of those steps is in the record, and your notes, texts and emails come with it.

• You cannot let an answer you know is wrong go out. RECO has said, in the UFFI context, that representations must reflect only the seller’s personal knowledge and that an agent with actual knowledge cannot let their seller give an untrue warranty. The principle travels. If the statement contradicts something you personally know, it does not leave your hands until it is corrected.
• Do not help them answer. Do not complete the form. Do not suggest a wording. Do not tell a seller what a question means or what the consequence of an answer will be. Those are exactly the judgements that turn you from a courier into a source, and at least one of them is legal advice.
• Latent defects you know about are yours to disclose. The duty to disclose a latent defect rendering a property unfit or dangerous to every interested buyer, obtain acknowledgements and provide copies is not discharged by completing an SPIS, and not avoided by declining to.
• Your marketing repeats the SPIS. A misleading statement is one that causes someone to have a wrong idea or impression, and it does not matter that not everyone was misled. “Dry basement” in your listing is your statement now, not the seller’s.
• Stigma questions sit outside the form. A stigma — criminal use, a death, a notorious former owner, a remediated grow operation — is entirely subjective, and a seller’s agent should obtain written seller instructions on how those are handled. An SPIS does not do that work.
• Keep the file. Which version went out, when, to whom, and what acknowledgement came back. Trade documents are kept at least six years. On a contested file that record is the difference between a defensible position and a memory.

For the buyer’s agent

Your job is narrower. An SPIS is a research map, not a report. Every yes is a document request, every unknown is a task rather than a clearance, and none of it substitutes for an inspection.

Do not let a buyer waive an inspection because the statement looked clean — that is precisely the fact pattern in Coppendale. And be careful with “sole and absolute discretion” in SPIS-1. In Marshall v. Bernard Place Corp. (ONCA, 2002), as reported, a discretionary inspection condition was held to carry both objective and subjective elements. A clause that reads like a free option to walk is not necessarily read that way — say so before your buyer signs.

The home inspection condition post covers that ground in detail, and the representations and warranties post covers the survival wording that decides whether anything lives past closing.

How I want it handled

1. Raise the SPIS question at the listing appointment, before the property goes live, and confirm in writing that the decision is the seller’s with advice from their lawyer.
2. If the seller completes one, do not assist with the answers. Hand it over, let them complete it, take it back.
3. Read it against what you know. If anything conflicts, stop and escalate the same day.
4. Where an SPIS exists, get it to buyers before offers and use SPIS-2 to record receipt, rather than relying on post-acceptance delivery.
5. On the buyer’s side, have the clients’ lawyers structure the delivery deadline so the buyer’s window runs from delivery, not acceptance.
6. Keep the version history, the delivery record and the acknowledgements in the file for as long as the record retention rules require.

Questions agents actually ask

Related reading

• Title Clauses in Ontario: Easements, Crown Restrictions and In Trust for an Undisclosed Principal
• Assignment Clauses in Ontario: What the Right to Assign Actually Gives Your Buyer
• Severance and Subdivision Conditions in Ontario: Drafting for Approvals You Do Not Control
• Kitec Plumbing Clauses in Ontario: The Warranty, the Acknowledgement, and the Settlement That Closed
• The Parking Clause: One Line That Prevents a Closing-Day Argument
• Every clause and condition guide in one place

This is professional commentary from a Broker of Record on drafting and disclosure practice around the Seller Property Information Statement in Ontario. It is not legal advice. Whether a seller should complete an SPIS, and what liability may follow from one, are questions for the client’s own lawyer. This is general professional commentary from a Broker of Record on drafting practice. It is not legal advice, it is not a substitute for your own brokerage’s policies, and it does not create any professional relationship. Clause codes refer to OREA’s Guidelines for Residential and Commercial Clauses, an OREA member resource — the clause wording itself is OREA’s and is not reproduced here. Always work from your brokerage’s approved forms, and send your client to a lawyer for anything turning on interpretation, enforceability or remedy. Legislation, regulator guidance and case law all change; verify anything you are relying on.